PHP 4 Bible

The PHP 4 Bible is a comprehensive tutorial and reference to PHP. The Bible provides a clear, coherent description of PHP and how to use it whether you are a web developer, someone with ASP experience, or a C programmer. The book covers why users need PHP, how to get started, how to add PHP to HTML, and how to connect HTML web pages to databases. The authors take advantage of their own extensive experience using PHP to provides case studies of how and where to use PHP, along with advanced topics such as HTTP, cookies, redirection, building graphics, and sessions.

Why you need this book:
* Comprehensive tutorial for PHP4: covers all the basics of PHP 4, and how to use PHP to connect HTML- and XML-based web pages to databases.
* Essential reference for programmers: provides extensive PHP case studies, and appendices that get you up and running quickly if you have a experience with JavaScript, ASP, Perl and C/C++
* Covers the key features and improvements in PHP 4
* Advance topics include: building graphics, classes and objects, sessions, cookies, and real-life case studies
* Expert authors: Tim Converse is a programmer with experience in web developer and who instructs at the University of Chicago. Joyce Park is a writer on open source topics and web developer who creates sites using PHP.

Tim Converse is a programmer with 10 years of experience in Lisp, C, C++, Java and web techniques including PHP. He has an MS in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Chicago, where he taught several programming classes. He's designed and implemented systems that pick stocks, answer questions about space colonies, recommend novels, and help people pick out ties.

Joyce Park fell into Web development as a form of dissertation avoidance while studying/teaching history at the University of Chicago, from which she earned an MA. She has worked on several systems that combine deep content with AI techniques, such as the award-winning MysteryGuide.com; most of those were developed in PHP3. Joyce contributes documentation to various OSS projects, and her essays have garnered praise from the editors and readers of Slashdot, OSOpinion, SolarisCentral, Linux.com, and many others worldwide. Having herself clawed her way up from the very bottom of the technological ladder, she's in a good position to understand what newbies really want to know but are afraid to ask.